green

Researchers at UBC have studied the recycling behaviour of people who work in green buildings to those who don’t and found that – regardless of their past habits – people in green buildings recycle more. This is really nifty because it proves that design of an interior space alone can impact how people recycle and the efficiency of waste management.

She says there are several things designers take into consideration when integrating recycling and garbage receptacles into buildings, such as:

Locating them in areas where people are likely to use them, such as the CIRS’s kitchenettes.

Making bins easy to access for patrons and maintenance staff.

Clearly labelling bins.

It’s also important to make the recycling hubs look good, she said.

“Do you want to see great big bins out in the corridor? No, not really,” says Gushe. “You want to integrate the utilitarian things in a building into the fabric of the building, so that you don’t have this really ugly stuff sitting out there.”

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The Empire State Building in New York has received a green overall that has cut 20% of the building’s energy consumption and will save the owners a ton of cash.

The renovations are part of a $500 million rehab plan for the building. The building’s owners, Malkin Holdings LLC, filed for an initial public offering back in February which valued the building at $2.5 billion.

The changes to the Empire State include:

–Filling the existing windows with an energy saving gas and adding an additional plastic pane.

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Denmark is getting looking to have 50% of it’s energy come from wind power and are looking to further their need to import any energy at all. Not only is Denmark looking to lower the need for foreign energy they are trying to decrease the amount of energy that the country uses.

“Denmark will once again be the global leader in the transition to green energy,” said Lidegaard. “This will prepare us for a future with increasing prices for oil and coal. Moreover, it will create some of the jobs that we need so desperately, now and in the coming years.”

The agreement will help Denmark achieve its goal of supplying 100% of its energy from renewables by 2050, including electricity, heating, industry and transport.

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Cement is a very popular building material for a lot of good reasons, the problem though is that the process of making it requires a ton of energy. This problem has led to a growing number of people looking into ways to make cement less damaging to the planet. We’ve covered cement on here before.

The Smithsonian has a good round-up of the current world of greening the cement industry. In some ways these solutions can work together.

Though still refining its procedures, Novacem is racing with at least five other companies and university centers to come up with a greener cement. “Given all the attention to carbon these days, a lot of entrepreneurs have popped up,” said MIT’s Jennings. “They see the opportunity side.” With cement a $170 billion-a-year industry, investment money is pouring in.

A California company called Calera has perhaps the most unusual approach: It harnesses carbon dioxide emitted from a power plant and mixes it with seawater or brine to create carbonates that are used to make cement. They can be added to Portland cement to replace some or all of the limestone. Calera is backed by a $50 million investment from Vinod Khosla, a computer engineer who is perhaps Silicon Valley’s most respected and deep-pocketed investor in green technologies. “We are actually making our cement out of CO2,” said company founder Brent Constantz. “We are taking CO2 that would have gone into the atmosphere and turning it into cement.” The technology is still in development, with a demonstration plant in Moss Landing, California, and a partnership with a Chinese group to build a plant next to a coal mine in Inner Mongolia, where they plan to use carbon dioxide emissions to make cement.

Calix, an Australian company, makes cement using superheated steam, which modifies the cement particles and makes them purer and more chemically reactive. The process also separates out carbon dioxide, making it easier to capture the gas and keep it out of the atmosphere.

Louisiana Tech University, like Novacem and Calera, is doing away with limestone altogether; it’s using a paste called geopolymer, which is made of fly ash, sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide.

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Malls have lost a lot of their popularity in consumer culture which has caused many malls to close down. This leaves huge swathes of land unoccupied in towns and cities that can be repurposed from something destructive to the environment to something that respects it.

Well, if a mall hasn’t already closed, it can consider one of the new iterations of the contemporary mall. Communities and city planners have gotten creative, using abandoned mall spaces for schools, government offices, medical clinics, casinos, wedding venues, call centers and churches. And while some malls are being torn down and housing or completely new retail buildings are being built, it is much more economically savvy (and green) to reuse the existing infrastructures.

How about an urban farm? While streams and other natural features have been brought back from being buried under concrete in some situations where malls are getting makeovers (along with adding putting greens, dog parks and other outdoor activities), a few enterprising souls have taken a look at the great natural light (many malls were built with skylights), good access to public transportation, and central locations. And thinking green.